Immigration rule fight pits Chamber of Commerce against U.S. workers

By Ross Eisenbrey - 01/14/11 12:35 PM ET


Everyone knows U.S. immigration law is broken, but most people don’t know why. Powerful interests benefit from the system’s failures and lobby hard to prevent change. Perhaps the biggest beneficiaries are businesses that don’t care where their workers come from as long as their wages are low and they have no bargaining power. The fight over a regulatory change currently working its way through the courts and the U.S. Labor Department vividly illustrates why the broken system is so hard to fix.

The biggest failure of immigration policy that businesses exploit is, of course, the easy employment of illegal aliens. Congress created a system that is doubly flawed: by making undocumented workers illegal, it leaves them unprotected from firing and deportation if they complain about unsafe work, ask for wage increases, or join a union. Yet employers who hire illegal aliens have gotten off scot-free for most of two decades. Employers have hired approximately 8 million undocumented workers since 1986, but only a handful of businesses have ever been punished. The law was designed to let employers rely on their employees’ fraudulent documents.

The Labor Department’s proposed immigration rule has much smaller consequences, but it demonstrates how little regard the Chamber of Commerce and other business groups have for U.S. workers, and how they work to keep the system broken. Every year, the H-2B visa program allows U.S. employers to import 66,000 foreign workers for up to three years, regardless of national or local unemployment, if the employer is unable to find qualified U.S. workers willing to work at the prevailing wage. The last administration changed the way the prevailing wage is calculated in order to lower it, making it much cheaper to import foreign workers and discouraging U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents from applying. As a result, despite 10 percent unemployment in many cities over the past two years, many landscape companies were “unableâ€